Tab goes home by door, right into Aelise's office. "Hello again."
"If I have to say 'I'm Tab, I'm new' one more time - which thankfully I don't expect to - I will become very consternated with my situation of being both Tab and new. But otherwise all is well. There are Kersibles on their way to everywhere and the welcoming committee has been found and they're going to patch this particular Jane-related problem, although I don't know if that will get all possible Jane-related problems, they don't exactly dare experiment on how to break her."
"Ye-e-es, but first I'm going to see if I can't hire a Joker, either one of the two from Origin or maybe entice Corona back on the condition that he doesn't have to be anywhere near Chelsa. If I can't get one of those I need to live off the largesse of other Bells, which I can do - Pattern's been acquiring more coins than she uses for sixteen years from three and a half Jokers, and Brilliance is really high output, and Stella has spares too. Anneia and Sandre would also make good mints, Stella has alts of them on payroll, but I don't think I can convince them to work for me, at least not for the next few hundred years."
Aelise nods. "I'd like Anneia and Sandre made Harley-style immortal, if you don't mind and can get it done without letting them know you exist; I think they're good candidates for replacing him. And I expect I could probably get them to work for me, if all they had to do was funnel coins in my direction. So you're not without a local source even if you can't get a Joker to touch this world with a ten-foot pole."
"Involves traveling Downside and getting it from the admin - I only have torchability one meta level up, not two. D'you want to do that? She has the ability to read all the thoughts of the lifetime of anybody who gets near, especially if they're torchable - doesn't do it to Bells anymore, but I don't know about you. She's also generally omnipotent but that's the one thing she has a history of doing without asking first."
"She can see and hear out of it but you can turn that off, there's a little switch," says Tab, "and then she can't do anything with it except mind the clock, and brainphone people in the relevant world even if there aren't other nodes. She has no yoinking-people-without-permission habit."
"Does that work?"
"I'm not badly socialized in the same way as Aegis - she's a Bell who was raised in military school - but I did kind of grow up with only you, Kers, and briefly Harley for in-person company and had to lie a lot to everyone I talked to on the internet. So if I want to be rid of my virginity with someone who isn't approximately a total stranger, I can comb through a lot of people - probably dead Torontonians or something, since I still have to lie a lot to local Earthlings - learning how to be a social primate properly, or I can skip that part and proposition the conveniently-shaped version of myself who escapes strangerhood on that basis."
"After I figure out coin sourcing, one way or another, I terraform a planet, possibly in another solar system so astronomers around here don't notice anything if I'm careless invisibling everything, and ask the admin to instantiate it whole cloth less Delphi and company, where Jane can see it, and Jane puts it where I want it."
Some distance away, the sand gives way to scrubby pale purple grass, which in turn heralds the beginning of a forest. The trees are huge. Their craggy black trunks grow in thick, majestic spirals up to at least a few hundred feet, with branches spreading out in wider arcs from the corkscrew trunks, sparsely near the bottom but in thick sprays up top. The end of each branch has a wide pointed leaf with blotchy zigzag stripes of colour banding from the base to the tip, almost like they were tie-dyed. Colourful vines twine around trunks and branches and dangle like leafy ropes all the way back down to the forest floor.
But there's no sound except the rustle of vegetation in the slight breeze - no squirrels, no mice, no birds. No mobile life of any kind.
The planet turns out to be heavily forested, but there is one low-lying plain nearby - covered mostly in various purple grasses - that happens to have a configuration of lake and rivers very similar to pre-nuking Toronto. The city could be plopped right onto the edge of the lake with only minor adjustments to the surrounding landscape.
"Fair enough. Golden recognized him, apparently on her world he was a vampire, they do this mating-for-life but he spun the mate-for-life roulette wheel and wound up with a half-vampire and they don't do that, he wound up kind of mad-stalker until she - the stalking victim - killed him."
"Same approximate power, yeah, less powerful as seems to be the theme - he had to have met the person and couldn't triangulate very effectively. Golden thinks he thought he was playing some elaborate game of hide-and-seek game with her till the very end."
"Yeah. It's not invariable, and also being a vampire is no longer permanent, you can fix it on a nontorchable by sending them through Downside or on a torchable with an evil. Werewolves from Aurum do something similar but they don't go stalkery, just kind of dependently depressive, in the worst case."
"One of you has a werewolf," Tab adds. "Libby from Eos. Wandered in among some wolves and one of them imprinted on her and she brought him home and turned her Kers into a werewolf too because it's not a great idea to have one wolf all by themselves - the alphas can take it, Elspeth can bring hers places, but Libby's wolf isn't one of the alphas."
"Golden theorizes that Demetri and his lady love would have gotten along really well if her power had worked on him. She does a kind of - not-mattering thing, where you can technically see her but you can't think she's important. And Demetri could not think she wasn't important, so she had his attention constantly and couldn't stand it and was scared of him."
"Yeah. If Golden had been more reliable about the shielding back then they could have taken over the world together, because Allirea could share, too - only with one person and only while she was faded out herself, but Golden would still be able to see her, and Golden blocked everything that got past Allirea. They could've walked into the throne room of the previous rulers and casually disassembled everyone while their next victims were trying to figure out how to blame the weather. But Golden kept slipping so they had to go with something more complicated involving Elspeth and Nathan and a straight-up fight."
"Yeah. I need a mint. I can try to hire away Pattern's spare, but I thought I'd try you first, in case 'probably not even in the Milky Way' is far away enough from Chelsa to suit you. I'll be resurrecting Toronto just about as soon as I have coin influx sorted out. I'm gonna put it there." She points at the place.
"I hoped so! Anything else we should work out? I'm probably going to install ground rules on Arborea not unlike what other space-colonist Bells are doing, I hear this might annoy you, will routine vacations out of the world do the trick or do we need to think of something else?"
"They will basically make all kinds of antisocial behavior physically impossible. Nonconsensual violence, propagation of unwanted noise, harassment, etcetera - I'm copying the state of the art from Pattern. If you would like to be specially excepted so people can attack you, harass you, and keep you up at night with saxophone practice, that can be arranged."
[Tab would like to resurrect an entire city that was nuked into oblivion a few centuries ago on her world,] Jane reports to the admin, [and would like to know if she can get it back all in one piece, without the people responsible for the nuking - a fellow named Delphi and the people who were working with him. Can we do that?]
She thinks about how old cities used to work (she has read a lot about them, especially now that her entire to-read list was slurped up when she got near enough to her computer) and what things about them will need to be tweaked. She lays down state-of-the-art ground rules. She contemplates mechanisms for informing the citizens of Toronto. They will appear afraid; the city was in tension for a long time before the nuke fell, and she wants to calm them down, although by the same token she doesn't want to wake anyone who is asleep or overly shock anyone who managed to live sufficiently under a rock that they weren't freaked out already. There's several revelations to cover - the bomb fell, it's been a long time, they've been brought back, they're all torchable now, this isn't Earth, they're under new management, anyone they knew from other places will have to be fetched up separately, the new management is - she's going to start out calling it 'extremely Gifted'.
She composes a public address that covers the "everything's okay, you're safe, remain calm" part - everyone will hear it in her voice, and all people will also get writing on the subject of the more complex topics to read at their leisure. She composes the address and the pamphlets both in the Speech for convenient general dissemination; Toronto was not a monoculture, after all. She sets up some more wishes, pentagons herself old-timey English - she'd be mutually intelligible without, or in the Speech, but just for completeness. The people of Toronto are going to have enough to get used to anyway.
It'd be pretty hard not to notice the trees on Arborea.
The streets of Toronto say soothingly in the Speech, "It's okay. You're all safe, Delphi and company are gone, please remain calm. Further information has been delivered in writing."
Further information is, in a timely manner, delivered in writing.
[Hey, Luhan, this is Tab - I'm the resident version of the person who teleported over to you a while back.]
[Yep. I have a guided teleportation magical thingamajig and I let it pick me a place and it found me this great planet that already had breathable air and plants but no animals and water in almost precisely the right layout to plop Toronto on it, so I nudged what needed nudging and plopped Toronto.]
"Well, I'm taking requests on who else to bring back and will be making places to put them, since I imagine plenty of people from here had friends who died later - or earlier - in unrelated ways. So I'm using it as a jumping-off point to populate this planet with. It's possible the actual structures here won't be inhabited for that long; I mean, Toronto comes with its own micro-economy, I'm not going to interfere directly with it except to ensure that there's food and water incoming despite the lack of farms, really, but I'm not planning to build anything that requires rent paid or what have you. Anybody dead you want back?"
"Well, most of them she wouldn't have to call up special like Toronto, most of them Jane can get for me without the admin's intervention. And in return she does not have to actually run the afterlife on a day-to-day basis, which apparently she didn't love doing."
"Well, I don't know all the contents of your conversation with her, but I gather she showed up and made a lot of arcane pronouncements and then left. And here I am and I look like a younger version of her not in a witch costume, right? Which is one arcane pronouncement down, so more of them shouldn't be such a stretch."
"My alts throw parties occasionally and there'll probably be one in a couple weeks. You can come if you want," Tab says.